Today, we tell a familiar story. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.

I want to tell you about the
Holland Tunnel, but I should warn you: the story is
a lot like other stories about great engineering
works. The plot goes like this:

Leaders acknowledge a large public need. They
debate strategy and try to set up a plan for
solving the problem. Then a visionary separates
himself from the pack. His project is grander and
bolder than anyone had expected. He convinces
skeptics and puts the project on the road to
completion. Finally, he dies on this side of his
Jordan River. Others are left to complete the
dream.

That's how it was with Hoover Dam, the Brooklyn
Bridge, the Great Eastern steamship,
and the Mount Palomar Telescope. That's also the
way it was with the Holland Tunnel. In 1906 the
Island of Manhattan, its population mushrooming,
found it harder and harder to bring in supplies.
After 13 years of discussion, a young civil
engineer named Clifford Holland was given the job
of drilling a highway tunnel under the Hudson
River. But by now a tunnel of this kind faced a
brand new problem -- one that earlier tunnels
hadn't faced. Now the automobile had come into its
own. This tunnel would have to carry 40,000 trucks
and cars each day. That meant huge quantities of
carbon monoxide gas had to be cleared out of it.

Holland began drilling a pair of 30-foot holes,
almost two miles long, under the Hudson River. The
most startling feature of the tunnel was entirely
new. Holland provided it with a ventilation system
that used four million cubic feet of fresh air each
minute to flush out exhaust gases.

The project was enormous -- a constant string of
problems had to be solved; new technology had to be
created; and skeptics had to be fended off. It took
a terrible toll on Holland. By 1924 he had it under
control, but he was suffering from nervous
exhaustion. He retreated to a sanitarium, where a
heart attack finished him off. He was only 41.

Calvin Coolidge opened the tunnel in 1927. On the
first Sunday it carried 52,000 vehicles. Today it
carries 80,000 per day. Holland's controversial
ventilation system, conceived to supply half that
number, still handles them without trouble.

You've heard the story in other forms, but it
doesn't wear out. We can always welcome the story
of a heroic technology carried out by a
self-sacrificing hero. And there are more people
like that to admire than we might first think.

I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.

(Theme music)

McKay, E.M., Tunneling to New York. American
Heritage of Invention and Technology, Fall
1988, pp. 22-31. This episode has been greatly
revised as Episode
1698.

For a full-size image click on
either thumbnail aboveHolland Tunnel images in The
World Book of Knowledge a year before it was
finished

On the left: Breaking through to join the two sides
of the Tunnel.
On the right: Schematic diagram of the Jersey side
of the Tunnel.